James Stuart
King
You're not wrong. The navy was able to keep Jews in service until the end of the war, and the army was the main centre of resistance to Nazi rule, and the proximate source of the July 20 Plot. Military intelligence (the abwehr, under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, straddled both.From walking around London, most of the stone buildings which make up the centre are from about the time of Trafalgar or later. I think the grand phase of architecture was from somewhere between 1805 and 1914, and generally financed by the profits of imperial expansion and motivated by the need to show them off. It's quite remarkable how many London landmarks have the names of far-off places written on them to commemorate an invasion or a war.
As for Nazis, the German establishment in the late thirties and early forties didn't come out of the blue, especially in organisations like the armed forces. The people leading the armies into Poland had served for many years; in a sense, that probably explains why the army and navy proved much more conservative and difficult for Hitler to deal with than the air force, which was entirely built by the Nazis themselves.
The Nazis also had a lot of trouble taking over the civil service, and many of their civil servants ended up doing the same jobs under Weimar, the Nazis, the occupational authorites, and eventually East or West Germany, depending on what half of the country they were in. Good civil servants were, for the most part, too useful to dispose of, regardless of their political views. That's how a piece of filth like Klaus Barbie ended up working for the Americans.